So asked Christopher Morris, host and creator
of the U.K. television program “Brass Eye,” at the start
of an episode. He’s saying this as a TV monitor behind him
appears to show him having sex with an actress in a porn film. As
the cast of the show probes the topic of sex in present-day Britain,
we are told that Bono has publicly offered to fellate anyone from
the former Yugoslavia. We also learn the difference between “good
AIDS” and “bad AIDS” (the former resulting from
a blood transfusion, which inspires sympathetic ribbon-wearing in
right-thinking people, and the latter resulting from gay intercourse,
which inspires revulsion in those same people).

Satire
is one of the trickiest of the literary arts.

Satire is one of the trickiest of the literary
arts. In order to succeed, the satirist needs a ripe subject, he
needs to strike a balance between depicting the subject accurately
and depicting it as illogical, and he must have a clear goal: stinging
criticism, light humor or both. Even a satirist who’s assembled
all of these elements can fail if his message comes out garbled,
or simply if nobody finds it insightful or funny. As such, top-quality
satire is very rare, especially on the normally literalist medium
of television. Over the past 10 years, Chris Morris, co-creator of
the BBC’s short-lived newscast spoof “The Day Today” and
the radio program “Blue Jam,” has proven himself a master
of satire, both stinging and hilarious, and his crowning achievement
to date has been the seven-episode TV series “Brass Eye.”

“Brass Eye” aired on the independent
(that is, non-BBC) television station Channel 4, which produced six
episodes in 1997 before Morris decided he wanted to retire the show. “Brass
Eye” was a parody of the sort of TV journalism that became
common on both sides of the Atlantic in the early ’90s, which
substituted sensationalism and bluster for objective, factual reporting — think “20/20” or “Dateline
NBC” combined with the are-you-as-safe-as-you-think-you-are
tabloid shriek of “Hard Copy” or “A Current Affair” and
the muscle-headed, “no-nonsense” swagger of “The
O’Reilly Factor.” Morris aped these formats with striking
accuracy, from the out-of-control onscreen computer graphics to the
overuse of black-and-white freeze frames, and from the frightening-but-meaningless
statistics to the bombastic minor-key theme music and the clueless “expert” guests
making over-simplified judgments (although on “Brass Eye,” they
adjusted a dial labeled “RIGHT” and “WRONG” to
lend moral clarity to any situation).

Naturally, the media establishment was up in arms
over “Brass Eye” — partly for the occasionally
offensive nature of the show, but often just as much for the mockery
that Morris was allegedly making of well-meaning public figures.
This was Morris’ masterstroke: inviting well-known radio DJs,
activists, comedians, TV stars and legislators onto the program,
leading them to believe that the show was a legitimate news broadcast,
and tricking them into pontificating on phony issues and pledging
their support to bogus causes. As in “Da Ali G Show” (which
Channel 4 began airing three years after “Brass Eye’s” original
run ended), this added another level to the satire; rather than just
taking stabs at the nebulous concept of “the media,” Morris
also took aim at a more concrete archetype, the television personality.

For example, in the “Drugs” episode,
Morris tells viewers about a new legal club drug from the Czech Republic
called “cake” — which looks like a yellow aspirin
tablet about the size of a hatbox — and a montage of celebrities
vow to get the word out to young people about the dangerous substance.
Comedian Bernard Manning explains with a straight face that cake
is “a made-up drug … It’s not made from plants,
it’s made up from chemicals.” Longtime kangaroo-tying
advocate Rolf Harris talks about one side effect, called “Czech
neck,” where the cake user’s neck retains so much water
that it swells up and smothers him. Parliament member David Amess
actually proposed a bill to ban the substance during a debate at
the House of Commons. When Amess learned he’d been duped, he
was so furious that he won from Channel 4 the promise to air a disclaimer
with every rebroadcast of the episode. Other celebrities threatened
litigation after they discovered they’d been similarly pranked.

Another example of “Brass Eye”’s
brilliance was the “Science” episode. Playing off the
mainstream news media’s uninformed and usually ultra-alarmist
treatment of issues like genetic engineering and cloning, the show
decries “bad science” such as mutant clouds that eject
rain upwards into space, a physics experiment where researchers isolated
and blew up a fortnight (recalls one shaken witness, “The clock
on the wall, well, it was throwing up”), and the threat of “heavy
electricity” from high-voltage wires. We are told that this
last one is a phenomenon caused by “sodomized electrons” reverting
to their primitive state and spilling out of power lines to crush
people and buildings like “a ton of invisible lead soup.”

After being off the air for four years, “Brass
Eye” achieved new notoriety in July 2001 with the airing of
a one-off Special Episode sending up the British media’s hysteria
over pedophilia. In the months prior to the broadcast, the notoriously
sensationalistic British tabloid media, following a few isolated
but widely reported incidents of child abuse, had stirred up a public
frenzy against “kiddie fiddlers,” publishing names and
addresses of accused pedophiles. Vigilantes rioted in at least 11
communities, firebombing houses and assaulting people mistakenly
believed to be pedophiles. The “Brass Eye” Special set
out to demonstrate that the danger of this sort of misinformation
far outweighed any actual danger posed to children. This goal was
clear to the critics who praised “Brass Eye” for its
sharp wit, but Morris received death threats from people who thought
he was making light of child rape.

First, Morris appears in the TV studio as the
host, and the cast vows to plumb the depths of the pedophilia crisis.
Then, we cut to a “live bulletin” with a newsman (also
played by Morris) reporting on a mob gathered outside a prison to
oppose the release of a notorious pedophile. Although the criminal
is now quadriplegic and comotose, the cameras show the bloodthirsty
rioters chanting and burning effigies, and Morris tells the audience, “I’m
not sure if you can sense the air of aggression out here, but 10
minutes ago we threw this crowd a dummy full of guts. It lasted just
eight seconds. This is very much a protest that’s swallowed
a bomb, and given the detonator to a monkey.” Morris goes on
to anticipate confusion over how a fully paralyzed man could pose
any sort of threat to children by theorizing that “pervert
mechanics” might construct a robotic exoskeleton for the offender,
which we see in a “pre-enacted” video clip.

Later, we learn that a man in one town has disguised
himself as a schoolhouse in order to capture children, that pedophiles
have more DNA in common with a crab than an ordinary person (“there’s
no real evidence for this, but it is still scientific fact”),
and that sickos lurking on the Internet can make a child’s
computer keyboard release vapors making them more suggestible to
cybersex (MTV-UK presenter Richard Blackwood takes a whiff of a keyboard
and admits, “You know, I really do feel more suggestible already” — apparently
not realizing how right he is).

At the climax of the episode, the TV studio is “invaded” by
the militant pedophile organization, Mili-Pede. After their leader
has been subdued and put into stocks, Morris confronts him, going
so far as inviting his own 6-year-old son on stage to bait the offender
into admitting that he wants to molest the boy. The pedophile vehemently
denies this is the case, and finally admits, “I don’t
fancy him … I just don’t find him attractive, I’m
sorry.” For an instant, Morris is speechless.

Unfortunately, episodes of “Brass Eye” are
extremely hard to come by in the States. The entire seven-episode
run of the series is available for sale on the websites of U.K. video
retailers, but only on PAL videocassette and Region 2 DVD, both of
which are unplayable in most American machines. A few heavily-compressed,
bootlegged episodes have circulated the peer-to-peer networks, but
even these appear very rarely. There is a very faint possibility — thanks
partly to the minor success of HBO’s “Da Ali G Show,” another
Channel 4 import — that HBO or another American pay-cable station
might ask Morris to host or produce a stateside version of the show.
However, even this seems unlikely in the extreme; Morris is surprisingly
reclusive, preferring to spend more time with his family than giving
interviews or appearing on another series.

But multi-region DVD players and PAL-compatible
VCRs aren’t that difficult to acquire. So, if you have a healthy
appreciation for great satire and the means to play a British video,
there’s no reason you shouldn’t own “Brass Eye.”